My WWDC 2012 Scorecard

I published my WWDC 2012 Keynote Predictions a few days ago, lets see how well I did:

  • Sales: [0/1] Instead of the boring “we sold a lot”, they went emotional, “we helped a lot”. Nice, but not worth the 10 minutes as it made them hurry the laptop announcements.
  • Hardware updates [2/4]
    • No Mac Pro updates (Correction, they did bump the Mac Pro, just silently, but not to the new E5 CPU’s)
    • Lovely Macbook Pro updates
    • Lovely Air updates
    • And the new Retina Macbook Pro (I was so wrong there)
  • OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: [3/3] As expected, we got a release date, no radical new features (except dictation and power nap), and we did get Facebook.
  • iOS 6: [3/4] Beta, check, new maps, check, updated Siri, check. Did not expect the nice updates to the phone app and the new passbook app, but these do seem incremental.
  • iCloud: [1/2] Expected more features and got them, shared photostream and cloud tabs stand out. But not all of MobileMe has been replaced.
  • Apple TV: [1/1] No mention, as expected
  • Apple applications: [2/3] Expected iCloud updates for iLife and iWork (actually was expecting new versions, but the updates are OK). Did not expect any Pro updates like Aperture.
  • Steve Jobs: [0/1] No mention
  • No “one more thing”: [1/1] Check

And on the meta:

  • Liveblogs: [0/1] Expected failure, they worked great.
  • Missing magical features: [1/1] Check, lots of complaints about no retina on the Air, no iPhones (duh!), no Siri SDK, no Apple TV.
  • Share Price Drops: [1/1] Check
  • Not as good as a Stevenote: [0/1] Crickets, phew, glad to be wrong about that one.

So all in all, out of a possible 24 points, I got 15 right. Pretty average for a set of uninformed keynote predictions.

The winning announcements:

  • The new retina MacBook Pro, I want one.
  • Retina versions of Photoshop and Aperture, just wow
  • Mountain Lion next month
  • iOS 6 maps look just lovely

Posted By Hilton Lipschitz · Jun 11, 2012 5:51 PM